"The speaker of Russia's national legislature said Friday that a plan to send a parliamentary delegation to Washington to try and convince U.S. lawmakers that a unilateral military intervention in Syria would be unwarranted and counterproductive had been canceled.

"Sergei Naryshkin, speaker of the State Duma, said the delegation would no longer travel to the U.S. and called the decisions by House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to refuse to meet their Russian counterparts deplorable. ...

"'We are really disappointed by their decision not to meet with their Russian colleagues,' said Russian Embassy spokesman Maxim Abramov on Thursday after the U.S. congressmen made their decisions public."